And with the money left after these purchases, shoot with a Rebel 550d and a 50/1.8 :-> ... nothing against helping the economy, but for my money I'd first split large catalogs, allocate catalog & data on different disks, turn off sharpening/nr until exporting - lr5 also has smart previews to prevent working on the full resolution.

My LR 4.4 is soooo sloowwww on import, that the program has become useless to meI have about 50,000 images

Any suggestions?

Can you determine if its lightroom, or a card issue? Try copying image files to a folder on lightroom , and then importing them from that location. If still slow, then lightroom or the computer needs work. The lightroom catalog is a first target when there are issues, so rebuild it first. Secondly, I'd create a new catalog for test purposes and import images into it to see how that works.

Then, I'd start checking my computer hardware, test the memory, test the hard drive, since one of those could be a issue. Be sure to install the latest video card drivers, they cause a huge amount of trouble.

Finally, reinstall Lightroom with a new catalog. if that fixes things, then switch to the old catalog and verify its working. Then remove the test catalogs.

It's not the card. Using Lexar 1000x with USB3 reader. It's very fast with just a windows explorer copy to the drive, but painfully slow using Lightroom import.

Lightroom has always been fast for me. However, there are some ways to speed it up.1. Put the catalog on a SSD, preferably the main drive. You can put your images on a separate drive. SSD's are now relatively cheap.

2. Make sure you have enough memory installed, 8GB is often not enough to edit large files efficiently. try to get 16GB or more installed.

I have 12 GB RAMMy catalog images are on several different drives, Maybe that slows things?I may split the catalog

I have 12 GB RAM My catalog images are on several different drives, Maybe that slows things? I may split the catalog

How large is your catalog? Independently of the pictures in it, some plugins also dump a lot of data into the catalog. My personal pain threshold for catalogs is 1GB, of course ymmv with a faster system. Also 12GB of ram don't matter if LR doesn't load the whole catalog into memory but keeps reading it from hd, I don't know about that because I've only got 4GB of ram.